


Overheard

by Patomac



Series: Writer's Month 2020 [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Eavesdropping, Gen, Science Fiction, Slice of Life, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:15:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25741174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Patomac/pseuds/Patomac
Summary: Callie learns about the Captain's mysterious past while hidden beneath the floorboards.
Series: Writer's Month 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1862173
Kudos: 2
Collections: Writer's Month 2020





	Overheard

**Author's Note:**

> For Writer's Month Day 5: Soulmates

As a mechanic, I spend a lot of time lurking behind pipes, crawling beneath floors, and just generally skulking in places where you wouldn’t expect to find a human being. It’s cramped, tedious work, but it’s a living.

It’s also how I come by the ship’s best gossip.

When Olethe stole one of Hoshiko’s trashy romance novels, I was the one who discovered her locked away in her room reading it. When Tiona broke one of Korr’s precious Astramarine collectibles, I found the smashed figurine, complete with still sticky glue from the inadequate repair attempts, in the waste bay. When the Captain got handsy with that bounty hunter, who do you think was dangling from a pipe outside her doorway, trying to repair the water circulation system?

I rarely tried to eavesdrop—actually, when I did, I always seemed to get caught—but I had a knack for it anyway. I crammed myself into some small cranny of the ship to do a repair and bam! Top secret conversation coming right up.

Like today, for instance.

It had started innocently enough. I’d woken up to an alarm about a CO2 scrubber on the residential end of the ship going bad. No harm, no foul—I’d ordered the stock at our last resupply, and all I needed was a simple screwdriver and twenty minutes or so to swap out the new scrubber for the old. I popped up the deck plating in a maintenance closet, grabbed my utility belt, and slid beneath the floorboards.

(A sensible ship’s architect would have put the scrubbers _in_ the maintenance closet. Unfortunately the Starlust had been designed in the robot age. Back then, building for efficiency meant conserving space. The engineers who’d put this hunk of bolts together had assumed there would always be a bot around for routine maintenance. Idiots.)

I inch-wormed my way along the subfloor on my belly until I reached the offending scrubber. I was ten minutes into the repair when I heard someone knock on a wall above my head.

“I need you take a look at something,” the Captain said.

“All right,” my mother said. “Come in.”

I expected to hear the thunk of a piece of hardware dropping onto a table. My mother was a killer mechanic—better than me at fiddly operations, to be honest—but instead I heard the distinctive sound of a zipper and a rustle that sounded unnervingly like a piece of clothing being taken off.

My mother’s next comment confirmed it. “I’m happy to help Tiona when necessary, but she’s a much better medic than I’ll ever be.”

“Tiona will badger me,” the Captain said. “I need your discretion.”

“Of course,” my mother said.

More rustling followed, and then someone hissed through their teeth. The sharp sound managed to carry through the floor like air through a faulty duct.

“Sweet stars,” my mother said. “What have you done to yourself?”

“I didn’t do anything,” the Captain said. “It’s just like that.”

“All the time?”

“No. The bleeding—it’s new.”

Silence echoed from above. I pictured my mother squinting at something the way she did when she was trying to repair a particularly complex evaporator.

“I should clean it,” she finally said. “Antiseptic and a bandage will set you to rights.”

Her footsteps echoed across the room, and for a few minutes, all conversation in the room above ceased. I finished unfastening the old scrubber and started to attach the new one I’d brought with me.

“The way this is bleeding…” my mother said. “It almost seems like a pattern.”

The Captain didn’t say anything. A minute or so passed.

“This looks like a rash. Are these bumps always here?”

“Yes.”

A thin, papery sound filtered down to me. My mother must have been putting on a bandage.

“You’re all set,” she said, a few moments later. “If it keeps bleeding, come back and see me.”

More rustling sounded from above. Then the zipper sound in reverse.

The sigh that echoed through the floorboards was 100% the Captain. “Ask the question.”

My mother hesitated a brief second. “Those markings—if they’d been black, I’d say you got a bad tattoo.”

The Captain snorted. “That’s certainly one way to describe it.”

“What’s another way?”

The Captain was silent for a moment. “I don’t suppose you have any tea ready?”

Soft footsteps pattered across the floor and out of hearing range. Less than a minute later my mother returned. I heard two successive thunks as the porcelain mugs hit the table.

Silence reigned as tea was consumed. My mother was unnaturally good at the waiting game; if I’d been in the room, I’d have strangled the Captain for answers by now.

“I don’t talk about my home planet much,” the Captain finally said. “It holds a lot of memories for me. Some good, but most bad. This is one of the bad.”

“You got those markings there?”

“I was born with the markings.”

I heard the faint scrape of a mug against the tabletop. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. I come from a strange place. Even there, they’re an oddity.”

My mother fell quiet again. For a long time, the captain didn’t feel compelled to fill the silence.

And then she did. “We’re a superstitious people. A lot of us believe in a fate set out in the stars. Determined by the gods. The marks I have—what you saw—it was indicative of such a fate.”

“Interesting,” my mother said.

“Annoying,” the Captain said. “But also… also wonderful.” Her voice softened then, in a way that I’d never heard before. She was always the stern authority figure aboard the ship, barking orders. Even in her calmer moods, she tended to be wry rather than introspective. Disdainful rather than sincere.

“I had a lover once,” the Captain said. “He had the same mark. The elders of our clan said that we were fated. Soulmates, if you believe such a thing.”

“Soulmates,” my mother said slowly.

“We were… compatible,” the Captain said. “He wasn’t from the same city, or even from the same class as me, but every time we talked, he always seemed to know just what I was thinking. What I was feeling as well. When I was angry he knew how to calm me down. When I was upset, he always seemed to make it better. When we were alone, it was simple.”

“It sounds nice.”

“It was nice,” the Captain said. “It was perfect. For awhile.”

A spoon scraped porcelain. “What happened?”

All softness vanished from the Captain’s tone. “He died.”

The conversation didn’t last long after that. The Captain thanked my mother for the tea and departed. I heard my mother’s soft footsteps moving about her quarters as she cleaned up.

I laid on the subfloor and pondered what I’d heard for a long, long time.


End file.
